Handle With Care

White gloves are in many different contexts considered a symbol of cleanliness, good service, but also integrity, modesty, purity and nobility. “Handle with white gloves” means in Italian to take good care of people and objects with which we are dealing. This would be in perfect agreement with the idea that many movies and media present of handling old manuscripts with white gloves.

However, I’ve recently learnt that browsing an old and valuable book with gloves, whatever their color is, may do more harm than good. Gloves reduce the ability of our fingers to move and feel, can catch on fragile or damaged pages, and can carry dirt and debris, especially if in cotton.

Of course, bare hands can do exactly the same damage if we don’t pay attention, or if are oily and covered with lotions. As recommended by many librarians and institutions, among which the British Library and the Library of Congress, using clean, dry hands is the best option to preserve valuable manuscripts. It doesn’t mean that in particular conditions the use of gloves couldn’t be recommended or even required.

Image from the video “Using gloves” produced by the British Library.

To take the right decision we must consider the state, the age, the material and the relevance of the item we are handling. Or, to play it safe, consult a digital archive: no one will complain if you are eating pizza while reading a manuscript of the 15th century. [Silvana Munzi]

Migrating through the Centuries

The Fratercula arctica, a seabird known also as the Atlantic puffin, can be found in the North Atlantic and Arctic regions. It spends the winter in the open ocean and is rarely if ever seen from land, but very recently hundreds of dead Atlantic puffins are washing up on the Portuguese coasts.

The Atlantic puffin is particularly sensitive to pollution and climate changes. It is only one of many marine animals on the red list of endangered species that are affected by global changes of anthropogenic origin. This case highlights the importance of analyzing nautical documents to retrieve data about the historical distribution of animals and plants in oceanic habitats.

Rutters and logbooks, especially, are significant documents in such research. The presence of certain bird species in specific navigation areas, for example, was systematically recorded by pilots. In Manuel Álvares’ seaman’s book (ca. 1545), we can find mentions of “feijões", small birds that resemble magpies, when approaching the Tristan da Cunha islands, while different birds are present near the Cape of Good Hope, such as albatrosses, black cormorants with white beaks, and some gulls that have black wing tips. Between Tristan da Cunha Islands and the Cape of Good Hope, the pilot observed the presence of monk seals (but never in June, “since they take shelter from the cold on land”, the pilot noted).

Monk seals, another endangered species, were also sighted by the pilot Manuel Mesquita Perestrelo in the same waters. In his rutter (ca. 1575), Perestrelo wrote about “an innumerable multitude of monk seals, some of them of incredible size.”

Working as unintentional ecologists, sailors left us precious records that today help scientists to understand the correlation between species and climate change, thus contributing to biodiversity conservation. [Luana Giurgevich and Silvana Munzi]

Geography: A New School Subject as the Result of Early Modern Voyages and Explorations

The sixteenth century was marked by profound cultural, political, and religious transformations. The fracturing of Western Christianity, initiated by the German monk Martin Luther, was the background for the centralization of European states and their expansion into the newly discovered continents. This period saw the rethinking of the epistemological foundations on which knowledge was built and transmitted. The discoveries helped reduce the weight of classical and biblical authorities in favor of direct observations of nature’s phenomena. This era also witnessed a profound rethinking of the educational principles underlying European pedagogy throughout the Middle Ages. New types of schools (the colleges) were founded and new educational systems were developed. In this framework, new disciplines arose: among these we find geography.

Geography, intended as a school subject, was not actually absent from the medieval curriculum but was dispersed among a number of other disciplines. In the liberal arts courses, consisting of Trivium and Quadrivium, geographic knowledge was taught primarily through mathematics, geometry, and astronomy, as well as by using ancient texts of historians and ethnographers, from Herodotus to Tacitus. This division of geographical teachings reflected the needs of an age when knowledge of the world, and the distribution of lands and peoples, did not have to meet urgent practical needs. With the beginning of the first global expansion of European kingdoms and the creation of religious and mercantile missions to the four corners of the globe, a new need arose to transmit acquired knowledge about the world effectively and quickly. Out of this need arose a new geographic discipline in preuniversity schools, very similar to what is still taught in schools today. The process was actually slow and uneven, and it took centuries before an independent geography subject made its official way into classrooms. However, as early as the fifteenth century we see spreading, increasingly better structured and defined geographic manuals such as the textbook entitled La Sfera, written by Gregorio and Leonardo Dati in Florence. The book is inspired by John Holywood’s Sphere, but is different from it inasmuch as it is more descriptive of the parts of the world, and less focused on mathematics. The process of establishing geography in schools can be said to be definitively accomplished in the eighteenth century.

This historical path was a reflection of cultural and epistemological change. Faced with new practical demands for knowledge of the world, new categories of interpretation and transmission of knowledge asserted themselves. In many Western countries today many complain that less time is devoted to geography in schools. Actually, geography is still studied, but we are witnessing the reverse process of that which began in the Renaissance. In fact, geography is being divided again into other school subjects, such as economics, science, history, and law. Again, the change reflects new historical needs, mirroring the emergence of a new era. [David Salomoni]